Bloody hell

Lots and lots of people are condemning the murder of poor little Yassin. I can only imagine the howling that will start when or if the USA or somebody else finally kills poor sick Osama Bin Laden. The USA can apparently imagine it too, and has vetoed the UN security council resolution condemning Yassin's assasination.

For some reason the Western media have mostly failed to condemn, or indeed to mention, Egypt's extrajudicial killing campaign against their very own Islamic Jihad and Jamaat al-Islamiyya, which was quite ruthless and quite successful. Not that I want them to condemn it, of course, but why all that attention to Israel?

What pisses me off so much is not that some people claim that killing terrorists is morally wrong - this is a perfectly normal moral stance that I just don't happen to share. It's that they claim that it is ineffective in spite of all the obvious evidence to the contrary. When people start talking about "cycle of violence" and "root causes" I always start wondering whether they know what they are talking about.

The only root cause of terrorism is that it works. The purpose of terrorists usually is to attract attention to their cause and to make people do what they want. When you reward some behavior you usually get more of it; when you punish it, you get less. Doing whatever terrorists want you to do for their cause is a reward. In spite of the fact that some terrorists are indeed suicidal, killing terrorists is usually punishment.

Remember when Jamaat al-Islamiyya killed 58 foreign tourists in Luxor in 1997? Also, remember hearing about Jamaat al-Islamiyya after that? No, you probably don't, and that's not because Egyptian government has done anything that Jamaat al-Islamiyya wanted (which was, incidentally, to overthrow the Egyptian government and replace it with an islamist state). It was because the Egyptian government started a fairly wide campaign of killings and arrests of Jamaat al-Islamiyya's members. As the result Jamaat al-Islamiyya has reached a ceasefire with the Egyptian government in 1999, and has also honored the ceasefire since then. You can tell me that the Egyptian government's methods were immoral (and some of them were indeed immoral even to my taste), but don't tell me they didn't work, because they did.